Srinivas lowered his eyes respectfully. ‘He is not infirm. I have missed him by only hours, you understand. I felt his warmth in a chair he vacated at an inn. He eludes me easily, lieutenant, and I have come to understand why.’

They had launched into this exchange, this violent intimacy, without a word of the preamble Srinivas had given to me about his intervening years, without my father explaining anything about his descent from society, beyond the merest indication that liquor had blinded him. They were brothers, made siblings by their hatred and obsession over the absent man.

My father’s face was fixed in grim confidence. ‘It is not you, is it?’ he said.

I did not follow his meaning.

‘No,’ said the Bengali. ‘It is you.’

‘You seek him, he seeks me. Ha! I have hidden myself well. More rum, if you please.’

I could hear it in his voice, the false note. The perversity of a man who would sooner have something to rail at than face the dreadful yawning silence of his own irrelevance. Were they just two wronged men at a table, the obsession of each feeding the other? Or had the Bengali led him skilfully to the crux of all that troubled him, and a man he could blame it all upon?

Srinivas poured again. He had not drunk any himself, but he was no less intoxicated.

‘Why are you hiding like this?’

‘Oh, hmm, shame, of course. Fallen a great distance in the eyes of the world. And…and not just about me, you understand.’ He lifted his chin in my direction. ‘I cannot have him gain access to, to others.’

The Bengali made a small gesture of resignation, a flipped hand. ‘So you hide from him—but also you seek him, do you not? It matters not in the long run, you know. The hiding, the being seen. He has attached himself to your family.’ My father was nodding along. ‘What reason, who knows? But he is your curse, and he is not going to desist. There will come a day when he will stop bedevilling me, and it will be the day he finds you.’

‘What are you both talking about?’ I begged, but they ignored me.

‘Time you went and found him,’ the Bengali murmured, ‘do you not think?’

‘So where? Where do—’

‘—provocations for years now. Gestures, harassments. My vessel—’

‘What’s that wha’s thah wha—’

‘—the Howrah. In the islands, Furneaux group, near Preservation. This wreck, lieutenant, these taunts escalated now to such a degree: the matter must be brought to a head.’

‘And I…?’

‘End it!’ Srinivas pointed dramatically at my father, who of course could not see the gesture.

‘Yes, I—’